Diodorus Siculus

Diodorus Siculus , d. after 21 BC, Sicilian historian. He wrote, in Greek, a world history in 40 books, ending with Caesar's Gallic Wars. Fully preserved are Books I-V and XI-XX, which cover Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indian, Scythian, Arabian, and North African history and parts of Greek and Roman history. The history, which is a compilation of other sources, is often repetitive and contradictory. Historians generally regard it as uncritical and unreliable. It is valuable, however, as a source for the lost works of earlier authors, from whom he borrowed freely, and for his chronological lists of prominent figures from the 5th cent. to 302 BC

Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian of the latter half of the 1st cent. bc. The surviving portion of his history of the world was translated into Latin by Poggio. Skelton produced a translation into English, and there are references to it in D. Lindsay, Kirke, Milton, and even W. Morris.

Diodorus Siculus. Sicilian-born classical historian (1st cent. BC), often cited for his commentaries on the Celts, especially the northern Gauls. His Bibliotheca Historica [Library of History] was a universal history, beginning with the earliest mythological times and running to the contemporary conquest of Gaul; of forty books thought to have been written, ten survive.

Bibliography

See The Library of History, ed. and trans. C. H. Oldfather (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1935)